7of10DETROIT, MICHIGAN - JANUARY 25: Alysa Liu reacts after moving into first place after her Championship Ladies Free Skate during the 2019 Geico U.S. Figure Skating Championships at Little Caesars Arena on January 24, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)Photo: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images

8of10DETROIT, MICHIGAN - JANUARY 25: Alysa Liu and her coach Laura Lipetsky react after moving into first place after her Championship Ladies Free Skate during the 2019 Geico U.S. Figure Skating Championships at Little Caesars Arena on January 24, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)Photo: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images

9of10Liu holds her gold medal after winning the women's title at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. Liu began skating at age 5.Photo: Paul Sancya / Associated Press

When Alysa Liu was 5, her father took her to a Saturday public session at the Oakland Ice Center. Arthur Liu, an attorney, had passed by the rink on the way to his office.

At the time he was thinking about Michelle Kwan, who was 13 when she finished second at the U.S. championships in Detroit. Alysa took to figure skating immediately, and her father got her private lessons.

Eight years later, at age 13, the Richmond skater made history Friday night by becoming the youngest to win a U.S. individual title. Like Kwan’s big breakthrough, it happened in Detroit.

“It’s not fully sunk in yet — I am kind of out of it right now,” Alysa said after receiving her medal. “I am not thinking about anything I just did.”

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The 4-foot-7 prodigy is too young to compete in the next few world championships, which have a minimum entry age of 15.

But Alysa could provide a major boost for her sport domestically. The U.S. hasn’t won an Olympic medal in women’s figure skating since 2006.

Despite her age, she is a confident and intense competitor. She told reporters in Detroit, “I don’t skate to lose.”

Alysa will be 16 by the time the 2022 Games are held in Beijing. That will be the first season in which she is eligible to compete on the senior international circuit.

Previously, the youngest skater to win the U.S. championship was Tara Lipinski at 14 in 1997. Alysa beat her record by landing triple axels, a 3 ½-revolution jump.

Only three U.S. women — Tonya Harding, Kimmie Meissner and Mirai Nagasu — had been credited with landing one in competition before Alysa, who did it at age 11 in the Asian Open in Hong Kong in 2017, making her the youngest in the world ever to land it in an international event. She won silver in that competition.

Alysa has trained in Oakland under noted coach Laura Lipetsky since age 5½. Alysa usually practices four to five hours a day at the rink, including two hours of private lessons, which run $120 an hour. The Lius drive to Vacaville on Sundays for two hours of practice because the Oakland rink isn’t available.

Alysa does schoolwork with California Connections Academy, an online program that has been used by many elite skaters. The ninth-grader does homework at her dad’s nearby office between morning and afternoon training sessions. Her favorite subject is high school-level Mandarin.

She attended Chinese school for about three years, then the Oakland School for the Arts, which has a figure skating emphasis. But traveling to competitions took too much time for her to stay in a regulated setting.

Lipetsky has enlisted the help of other experts to assist in Alysa’s development, like choreographer Cindy Stuart, who has worked on “Disney on Ice” shows. Phillip DeGuglielmo of San Francisco has been her “harness coach,” using a device to prevent dangerous falls as she learns difficult jumps. A Sacramento dressmaker designs her costumes. Her father helps pick her music.

“I care about her so much, I give everything that I can to her because she only gets one shot,” Lipetsky told the Bay Area News Group. “She reminds me of someone that I was growing up.”

Alysa’s father told the News Group, “If we want to train her to be a national champion, a world champion or an Olympic champion, we have to provide her with the best training staff.”

Injuries are the bane of elite figure skaters, and Alysa has taken stitches in her knees and has had multiple hip injuries.

At 10, she was the youngest ever to win an intermediate-level national title. In 2017 she placed fourth in the novice division while trying seven triple jumps. Last year she won the junior title at age 12, the youngest in the competition.

“Sometimes I’m overwhelmed,” Alysa told NBCSports.com. “I’m like, ‘Omigod, I have a triple axel, and not a lot of people in the world have it.’ Then I tell myself, ‘Don’t think you’re the best in the world. You’re not the best yet.’”

Arthur Liu is a single father of five children who were born to two surrogate mothers through anonymous egg donors. Alysa is the oldest. Her siblings include 9-year-old triplets.

Her father, 54, was 25 when he left China after the unrest that led to the Tiananmen Square standoff in 1989. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Chinese universities, then taught English in college. His family stayed in Chongqing, now a city of 8 million in Sichuan province, although his mother came to help when his children were younger.

He received an MBA at Cal State East Bay and his law degree at UC Hastings College of Law in San Francisco.

He requests court appearances around Alysa’s competitions, although that’s becoming more difficult as her career has taken off.

He rises at 4:30 a.m. to clean and do laundry at the three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Richmond that he bought in 2017 to accommodate his three girls and two boys. Friends help with the parenting. The other children skate on weekends but have no interest in pursuing it further.

Alysa says Kwan and 2010 Olympic champion Yuna Kim of South Korea are her favorite skaters. Kwan became a two-time Olympic medalist, five-time world champion and nine-time national champion.

Tom FitzGerald has been the Stanford beat writer for The San Francisco Chronicle since 2009. He also covers men’s and women’s basketball and many other Stanford sports.

He also covers motor sports in the Bay Area and wrote about the America's Cup regatta in San Francisco in 2013, during which Oracle Team USA made one of the greatest comebacks in sports history to beat Emirates Team New Zealand.

Among the many momentous games he has covered were the 49ers' victory over Dallas in the 1982 NFC Championship Game, which featured "The Catch'' by Dwight Clark, and the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 Olympic upset of the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y. At the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, he rode the bobsled run with members of the U.S. team for a first-person story. He also rode on Russell Coutts’ Oracle Team USA catamaran in 2012 and in an Indy car with legendary Mario Andretti in 2014 for other first-person stories.

For 15 years he wrote a popular sports humor column called "Top of the Sixth" (later re-titled "Open Season"). A weekly version of the column was nationally syndicated in as many as 50 daily newspapers.

He has a degree in political science from the University of Massachusetts. He lives in Benicia.